To listen to the full episode, go to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patron. This gets you an additional episode every week, but also supports the show, keeping it commercial free and editorially independent.
Co-hosts Jared and Nick appeared at a book signing at Changing Hands Book Store in Phoenix, Arizona, to discuss Jared's latest book "The Midnight Kingdom: A History Of Power, Paranoia, And The Coming Crisis,"as well as answer questions from the audience.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I'm Nick Hauselman, co-host of the Muckrake Podcast, and I'm pleased to present to you a recording of a live appearance that I made alongside my co-host, Jared Yates Sexton, while at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona, in support of Jared's latest book, The Midnight Kingdom, A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, available wherever you buy your books.
If you enjoy this conversation, and I'm sure you will, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast and become a patron.
You'll get access to tons of exclusive content like live shows, our private Discord, and the full Weekender episode every Friday.
And now, I present to you our live discussion about the Midnight Kingdom.
Thank you.
Thank you all for coming.
I am Nick Hauselman.
This is Jared H. Sexton.
Hi.
This is great.
We do a lot of our podcasts separately.
He lives much farther away than I do in a way that we're not usually in the same place.
So it's a real pleasure for us to be together and look at each other's eyes as we speak.
To share the same space and the same gravity.
Absolutely.
And with y'all!
So thank you so much for coming out.
It's really cool to be here.
So, just real quickly, if you haven't, you know, bought the book, I think, you know, one of the goals I have here is to help you make that decision because the book really is something that, it's very valuable in a way that, like, it's not flowery prose that's going to be filled with all sorts of, you know,
Flowery language, but it what it does it puts you like in the room and it really gives you a sense of what is happening throughout history and it kind of actually covers a lot of maybe even the greatest hits of things that you might have already studied going up and in all sorts of history classes but what's interesting is that I think you've created sort of a An electrical current in between all of these different time frames that connects us right into what's happening today.
And I think that's always what you've been really great at on our show and on your other books.
And if you want to be able to see how all these things are connected from the beginning of Christianity till now, this is the book that does it.
And at the very least, you could sound a lot smarter at like cocktail parties.
And if you read deeper into the book, it's almost like a college course where you're really taking a survey of all these different areas.
And that's what we're here for!
Well thank you and so I just want to say it's really cool to be here and it's very nice for you to come out on a Tuesday and hang out with me and Nick.
The reason I wrote this book in the first place and the reason I've written all of my books is over the past few years I was kind of thrown into the deep end of the pool back in 2016.
I was just sort of a dude who ended up at a bunch of Trump rallies like reporting on what I had seen and what I was hearing and What I found was the story that we had been told about America, like, didn't work.
You know, like, I had, you know, taken courses.
I had read books.
I always thought that I had a really good understanding of history.
And somehow or another, starting in 2016, and then, of course, getting to where we are now, I realized that I didn't know actual history.
I knew mythology, right?
I knew a story of America that, like, carried a certain type of message.
And when I got into what America was and where it had been and how we had arrived at this current weird era, I realized I didn't know how we had arrived at that.
And so what I've done over the past few years on the Midnight Kingdom is I think the culmination of.
I, you know, I became obsessed over this idea and I went back to ancient Rome and I was just like, what happened here?
How did we move throughout history?
And what I found very quickly, and we talk about this a lot, is that the same conspiracy theories, the same stories, the same things that we're dealing with right now in 2023, that everybody always says, oh, this is unprecedented.
It's like, no, this literally comes from the beginning of modern history.
And unfortunately, if you don't recognize that, and if you don't treat it as such, right, what happens is that those stories maintain their power.
They're very, very powerful.
Like the exact same things that we're hearing right now, whether it's about gay and trans people, or about, you know, people of color, or women, or these deep state conspiracies, QAnon, you name it.
Those stories are very, very useful, right, in hurting people and controlling people.
And what we're watching right now, day by day by day, right, like every time you pick up your phone to look at the news, every time you pick up the paper, What suddenly happens is people throw up their hands and they're like, I don't know why this is happening, but we have seen it over and over and over again.
And we have to recognize where it comes from, why it works, and by doing that we can start to depower them and we can actually start to have something approaching a decent society again where people don't have to live in fear and be oppressed.
What I found amazing about the book is that religion is coursing through the entire book and the effects it has on societies and governments and countries.
Jesus is not a character in this book, which is fascinating to me.
He doesn't appear in this book, you know, in terms of directly describing him in the real world.
But he is everywhere, across every page and every paragraph, and I suppose that was intentional.
Well, I'll go ahead and say, I think there is a difference, and this book is both the story of white supremacy and how capitalism has sort of come together in order to go throughout history and oppress people.
I know that's probably not a shock to a lot of people in the room here.
But it's also about how Christianity has been warped and perverted in order to carry that out.
And one of the things that I keep finding in my research is that stories are incredibly powerful, right?
They're the reasons, like, we're able to tell ourselves why we do what we do when we're not really getting down into the meat of it.
And I have to tell you, it's not about Christianity.
It's about a version of Christianity that tells a story that says, this is why I get to take what you have.
This is why I get to enslave you.
This is why I get to tell you that you can't be who you are.
You can't love who you love.
You can't be the type of person that you want to be.
It is...
A really weaponized, awful thing that gives you power over other people, and when it intersects with politics, and when it intersects with economies, and when it intersects with the powerful, who are really, really good at using this stuff.
When those things come together, all of a sudden terrible things happen, right?
People lose autonomy over their bodies.
People suddenly can't live the lives that they want.
People suddenly have their rights to vote taken away.
And it's all sort of filtered through that idea, which is where we are again.
Right now, in 2023, we are watching an aggressive, authoritarian, international movement that is all around the world, but it's also in the United States of America.
And that movement is able to use the same stories that go back to ancient Rome, this warped idea of Christianity that gets rid of, I don't know, Or empathy, right?
All of that is thrown out the window.
And the only thing that remains is, my God told me I get to do this to you.
And unfortunately, we haven't moved away from that enough that it isn't still warping our society and how things work.
Well, you know, each chapter describes another version of that description of a tyrant taking over in a violent way and imposing their will on the people.
My question to you, Jared, having researched all this, is why can't we have a tyrant who takes over like that and then finally says, free disco Saturday nights?
Like, why can't we find someone who actually can get through that and actually be benevolent and someone who, in earnest, wants to help people?
Are you asking why we don't get a good dictator?
I guess that's what I'm asking.
Okay, that's fine.
We'll go that way.
No, I'm asking why we don't have free disco.
Free disco.
Well, the problem in all of this, and I don't have to tell you all, like you've seen a first-hand glimpse of it over the past couple of years.
By the way, I love Arizona.
Y'all are wonderful people.
It's beautiful outside.
Things are happening in this state, right?
That people are looking, I mean, I was absolutely shocked.
We talked about it on the show.
People going through ballots looking Looking for bamboo traces.
Like wild stuff, you know?
And the problem is that what we're talking about, that sort of mindset where there is a group of people who are better than everybody else, right?
There's a hierarchy.
And they deserve to rule.
And by the way, it's always weird because it always ends up being white men, white wealthy men who think that they're the ones who should rule everything.
Well, that group of people who use those stories and sort of turn their back on democracies, it turns out they're doing it for their own selfish purposes, right?
And meanwhile, they can say, oh, I'm doing this to be benevolent.
I'm trying to help everybody.
But these stories, these conspiracy theories, the destruction of democracy, it's never done for people.
It's never done to help them.
It's always part of this, what some have referred to as an authoritarian mindset.
And one of the things that I keep trying to say, and if there's anything you walk away from tonight remembering, it's this.
I got raised up believing that fascism, Nazism, authoritarianism was a problem in Western Europe at a very particular time in the 20th century.
Right?
We beat it.
It's gone.
We don't need to worry about it anymore.
Guess what?
Not true at all.
This is a constant thing that we have to be on lookout for.
It takes different forms.
It does different things.
But when you actually take a look at how it works, you are literally fighting this stuff Throughout history.
And you have to continue to fight it.
And if you pretend like it's not there, well, guess what?
It grows, right?
It's like whenever you have a bad case of mold in your house, and you're like, I'm sure this will take care of itself.
And you don't look at it anymore.
It gets worse.
And unfortunately, what we're talking about with the authoritarian mindset, it is a natural thing that happens in the world that we have to continually deal with.
You know, I thought we could get a little specific in the book about what's going on in each different chapter.
You have a lot of famous people in there, people you recognize, you know, Napoleon, you know, Aristotle.
A lot of people come up, and I'm kind of curious if you have a sense of, are there any good guys in this book?
Oh wow, I feel like I'm on the spot now.
I have an idea if you need... Well you know what's weird is you see some things, and by the way I gotta go ahead and just dip around in history a little bit.
You know how like you'll always hear these things where it's like, I was doing a show about Prager University the other day, I don't know if anybody knows what this is, but it's just like right-wing propaganda that's like laundering history and all this stuff, and they were talking about Thomas Jefferson, which I couldn't wait to click on that thing.
And they were just like, Thomas Jefferson, brilliant.
Guess what?
He was a complicated man in a time of slavery.
People didn't know better.
It's like, what are you talking about?
Abolition existed from the moment that generational slavery was brought aboard.
And you look at like, as Spain, as all these empires are going around the world, and they're like going into, and speaking of religion, they show up at your continent, right?
And they say, hey, we're here to help you.
We've got good news for you.
This religion is great.
Oh, great.
Great.
And we're gonna help you guys out.
But then, by the way, they enslave you, they commit genocide, and everything's terrible.
But there were even members back then, back in the age of empires, the age of colonialism, who were saying, we need to do better here.
You go back to feudal Europe, and there were people saying, hey, I know democracy isn't really a thing yet.
We need to have it.
One thing that I always get, and listen, I'm going to be honest with you, I get a little bit of a name of being like a prophet of doom, and I deserve it.
I get it, OK?
But I'm so optimistic, and I'm optimistic because, we were talking about this earlier, like during the Feudal Age, when literacy was at like, I don't know, I'm gonna be optimistic here, 5% of the population, people didn't know how to read, all the information was being held by a church that was like basically enslaving an entire population.
Like, we fought our way out of that, you know what I mean?
Like, we figured out what was going on, we put two and two together.
Humanity is responsible for some of the worst possible things.
But we're also kind of miraculous, too.
We're kind of amazing.
And I think there are plenty of heroes in history.
You just have to look beyond the stories that we've been fed to find them.
Fair enough.
And I think T.J.
might be, you know, Thomas Jefferson might be a guy in there that kind of, you know, looks like he's characterized to some degree as a guy who got it to some degree, right?
Like, what do you say?
Well, I mean, so Thomas Jefferson is like an incredible case because this is a person who, like, all the time, he was in America, of course, put together the Declaration of Independence, tried to lay the tracks for, like, getting rid of slavery while owning human beings.
It's complicated.
Then he hopped the first ship over to France.
He put together the Declaration of the Rights of Man, basically helped lay the ground for the French Revolution.
And then he came back and he was like, oh, I'm going to be president now and I'm going to wipe out Native Americans.
It's so strange that we don't wrestle with these people.
And I think that there's a lot to learn from the fact that the Founding Fa... I'm sorry, the Founding Fathers sucked almost to a person.
They're like the awful things that they pulled off.
And you can look at what happened with the United States and you can say, oh, it's incredible that they pulled that off.
But isn't it a more compelling story?
And I would love to hear what you have to say.
I think it's a more compelling story that they kind of sucked, you know?
And we can do better as opposed to, ah, we probably just need to keep going the same route.
Well, I think everybody, whenever I talk to them and give them that context of, you know, think about who the founding fathers were while they were designing the Great Experiment and having all this high-minded language.
Slave owners.
Yeah, they still permitted slaves.
That is the foundation.
And then, if you want to add in the context of that, the reason why we have a robust economy, probably the greatest economy of all time in the history of the world, is because it was built on free labor for so long.
Exactly.
And not only free labor, but free real estate.
Because you could just, if you needed some more money, if you needed some more room, you just went over here and you wiped out a group of indigenous people.
Instead, what do we get?
And you all know this.
We get this story of American exceptionalism.
Right?
Which is, God has chosen the United States of America.
We are so special.
And that's why we need to rule everything.
That's why everything's great.
When in fact, if you take a look at what has actually happened, you even scratch underneath the surface, it's exactly what you said.
It's a history of exploitation that set us up for where we are now.
And that's the argument.
That's why they're banning books now.
That's why they're going after public education and curriculum is because they do not actually, to be honest, they don't want us to have this conversation right now.
I thought Thomas Jefferson in the book, what he did understand it was trying to separate religion and government.
That seemed to be a big one for him.
And what I also found fascinating is at some point in the book, you make a connection between We finally see that merging when we have to talk about punishing people for doing wrong.
When we have to have laws that then become punitive and throw people in jail, if they can use the religious moral code that that established to then punish versus the notion of let us use religion to help people know what the right thing to do is.
Well, and by the way, this is an amazing thing, and I'm sure you all are pretty tired of this.
It's like, any time the right wing starts saying that they deserve to tell people what to do with their bodies, what to do with boats and all of that, they're always like, oh, this is a Christian nation.
It's like, oh, that is such a perversion of the story.
Because what actually happened was that the founders, Like, they weren't all Freemasons because they liked hanging out on Fridays and drinking some beers.
They were Freemasons because they needed a place to go and talk about, like, how oppressive religion was.
And they all agreed, they looked out, and this is something we don't talk about enough, they looked at, like, the 30 Years War, and if you haven't ever taken a look at this, like, Millions of people getting slaughtered all around the world, and they're like, because of the Reformation, because Catholics and Protestants are out warring against each other.
You've been listening to the free part of this episode.
If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcasts and subscribe for lots more additional content, including a Discord server and live shows.
We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try.
